When I started working on the first part of this column, my 1966 "Philips' New School Atlas" was holding up precariously. After two weeks of frequent use, its front cover has finally fallen off.

I continue to peruse the atlas, now turning my attention to its polychromatic political maps. While the shelf life of a physical map is a magnitude of thousands and millions of years, political maps are redrawn with certain regularity, be it on battle fields or around treaty tables.

My old atlas shows countries that no longer exist, others whose borders have been reconfigured and others whose names have changed. Yugoslavia, a country artificially cobbled together in the aftermath of World War I, began to disintegrate in 1990; the ensuing, prolonged series of bloody wars culminated with the creation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia and three other new nations. In 2014, the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic lost over 10,000 square miles of its territory when the Russian Bear bit off the Crimean Peninsula. Ceylon became Sri Lanka in 1972; Rhodesia was renamed Zimbabwe in 1980; and, more recently, in 1999, the Republic of Venezuela was rechristened as the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

When my atlas rolled off the printing press, the United Nations had 122 member states. Today, it has 193. During my birth year (1960) alone, 18 new countries joined the organization, and before decade's end, another 28 were added, 17 of them former African colonies.

The growing number of independent nations reflected the decolonization process that had begun in earnest at the end of World War II. It was most evident in Africa, which Europe's imperial nations had sliced as if it were a birthday cake, and in my neck of the woods, the Caribbean, where modern colonialism was imposed as early as the late 1400s.

When my family left Cuba on June 30, 1962, the entire insular Caribbean, with the exception of the Dominican Republic, Haiti and my homeland, was still colonies. Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago gained their independence a few weeks later. But in my proud English atlas, the U.K. still held on to most of the rest of the arch of islands from Grenada to the Bahamas.

The geography I learned in school came in handy when my family left Lima in 1970. We flew on a propeller plane that should have had one of those signs that reads, "Caution! This vehicle makes frequent stops." It flew north to Miami along an almost-straight line, stopping to refuel in Quito, Ecuador, and Panama City, Panama. It is hard to envision this without looking at a map, but the Pacific coast city of Lima sits on a longitude that is farther east (about 3 degrees) than Miami, which is off the Atlantic.

During the 1950s and 1960s, with the Cold War's polarizing winds raging around the world, nations had to take sides. Under Soviet pressure, in 1949, Central and Eastern European nations formed the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA); its military equivalent, the Warsaw Pact, was established in 1955. Their Western counterparts were NATO, created in 1949, and the European Community that began forming in 1958.

Before the century was over, the theretofore-seemingly invincible Soviet Union unraveled into 15 nations including Belarus, Georgia, Lithuania, Borat's adoptive Kazakhstan and another four "stan" nations. In Central and Eastern Europe, meanwhile, the Soviet Union's former satellites saw the collapse of their communist regimes, from Poland to Albania and everywhere in between.

On the other side of Europe, the European Community continued to expand, and in 1992, exactly 500 years after Columbus' fateful voyage, its members signed the Maastricht Treaty that created the European Union. It is now composed of 27 European nations, including three former Soviet Socialist Republics, six former Warsaw Pact nations and two former components of Yugoslavia.

On page 8, my atlas has a map of the world with political borders as they stood then. It also includes a series of white bands that represent the world's ocean trade routes; the thicker the band, the more tonnage carried. Among the bands, the widest by far is the one connecting the two coasts of the North Atlantic. Next in volume is one linking Western Europe's major ports with eastern South America's (Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires and Montevideo).

But at some point, in the early 2000s, the Pacific displaced the Atlantic as the world's main navigation axis: Japanese cars, Korean smartphones, Chinese toys and clothing, and, for goodness's sake, drinking water sourced from Fiji, 6,000 miles away.

The more the world changes, the firmer I hold on to my red English atlas.

Readers can reach Luis Martinez-Fernandez at [email protected]. To find out more about Luis Martinez-Fernandez and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.